San Francisco, CA, GDC, Booth 2116 (March 14, 2016) – At GDC 2016 this week at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, OptiTrack will demonstrate its latest technology advancements for virtual reality (VR) workflows via an interactive basketball experience. Participants donning head-mounted displays (HMDs) will be able to dribble and pass a basketball simultaneously in the VR environment and in the physical world. An OptiTrack 6 DoF tracking system will provide drift-free positional and rotational tracking for the HMDs, controllers, and players.

With the ability to track more than 75 rigid bodies simultaneously with <5ms tracking latency and a wide-angle camera view, the OptiTrack system supports a large number of HMDs and in-game objects in a single space, opening the door for a more immersive and complex VR experience that merges real-world objects with virtual environments. The company is also showcasing real-time full-body animation from the OptiTrack system into Unreal Engine 4®, with retargeting in IKinema.

“What’s already been accomplished in the VR space from a technology standpoint is incredible, but very few VR experiences offer interactivity and the freedom to walk around a very large room. Our systems enable developers to create high quality large-scale experiences and essentially turn any physical object into a motion controller or dynamic in-game element. As our VR customers have recently been pointing out to us daily, the potential applications are endless,” said Brian Nilles, Chief Strategy Officer, OptiTrack.

Key Features

Scalable: Precise wide-angle cameras and support for high camera counts allow for over 10,000 square feet of HMD tracking.

Flexible: Multiple HMDs can be tracked simultaneously, and any object can easily be made interactive within the scene. Support for Oculus Rift is built-in, with Samsung GearVR compatibility coming soon. OptiTrack’s open framework enables easy support for new devices.

Real-Time HMD Integration into Game Engines: In addition to OptiTrack’s existing pipelines through trackd, VRPN and Autodesk MotionBuilder®, a new plug-in provides real-time tracking of HMDs, rigid bodies and full-body animation. Skeletal data from the OptiTrack system is retargeted in IKinema and piped into the Unreal Engine. A similar integration for Unity® with retargeting in Mecanim is coming soon.